THE GOOD
The site is way faster! Memberful, our new system, is a lot leaner than what we used to use. Average load time is now 50% of what it was just a couple of weeks ago. The system is more resistant to spammers and we can more easily ban them from the site so they don’t keep popping up. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better. We still have moderation on just in case someone sneaks through so you may see your comment end up in moderation. If you do end up in moderation we’ll get it going as fast as possible. Most people have been able to transition to the new commenting system without any issues.
THE LESS GOOD
There were a couple of commenter account transition issues, mostly centered around people using a different email than they originally signed up with and the accidental creation of a new account. If you are signing up fresh this shouldn’t be an issue. There are still the odd commenting sign-up issues, please email me if you experience something strange. We originally planned to use our current commenting system for a while and link everything back up so you can see your old comments/profile page. The amount of work to do this is roughly the same as just launching the new commenting system, which leads us to…
THE FUTURE
We’ve been testing a new commenting system and our plan is to roll that out as fast as possible as opposed to upgrading the old one and then immediately tossing it out in favor of the new, better system. The new system has live notifications, better threading, rich media (emojis at the very least; we want to allow images, but we’re concerned about copyright stuff at the moment), upvoting, and a bunch of other features you’ve asked for and, frankly, we should have. We still want to give people a chance to transition their old accounts and user names while they can so we’re not going to do this immediately. Additionally, we want to test it now that Memberful is live to make sure there’s no weirdness we didn’t expect. Our estimate is that by mid-January we can have the new comment system rolled out and ready to use.
So far, everyone has been extremely understanding and patient and we’re extremely grateful. We’re a small staff with a small tech partner who’s used to building dealership websites. I can’t promise everything is going to work perfectly. I can only promise we’re doing our best, and never give up on striving to improve. Feel free to hit me with some questions below and I’ll do my best to answer. Photo Credit: Alfa Romeo via Wheelsage I’m sure this is inadvertent user error somehow, but the user experience so far is frustrating. It’s tougher than convincing David to buy a certified pre-owned Honda with no rust. That said, the faster site is nice. (…and they all still remember what Matt said in my Jalopnik farewell roast.)
